Monday, February 11, 2013

The Origin of "The Origin of the World"

Whistler’s “Symphony in White, Number 1: The White Girl

The 2/9/13 Arts, Briefly column of the Times cited Paris
Match as reporting on a unique finding regarding Courbet’s famous and infamous “The Origin of the World” (“The Other Half of ‘The Origin of the World,’" NYT 2/8/13) According to the Times’s recap of the Paris Match story “a collector says he has discovered the top
half of Courbet’s portrait.”In passing the Times piece mentions that the painting was “once owned by the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan.” Along with the notoriety of the painting’s wanton pose, Lacan was also notorious for the precocious way in which
he terminated his patient’s sessions. Cutting short sessions would, one thinks, mean that Lacan was able to see more patients in one day than the average Freudian
and this delicious tidbit might provide some insight into where all the
additional money went. But the discovery of the model’s identity is also good news for lovers of an ideal of feminine beauty that is currently held in low esteem. While a truncated
nude might be tantamount to the esthetic advantage of low definition (b&w in
film, minimalism in art), the closing of the circle here strengthens a worthy
cause. The sitter or spreader who, the Times remarked, was “thought to have been Joanna Hiffernan, a model
and muse not only to Courbet, but also Whistler,” can now can be a spokesman for
the pubic hair and a posthumous protestor against Brazilian waxing, anorexic photography and other forms of pedophilia that have infected our culture. Were Anna Magnani, who
sported hair in her armpits, still alive, she'd undoubtedly be pleased that
the identity of Courbet's model was uncovered.

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About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.